Sunday, 24 May 2015

Gotek using External floppy cable on CDTV

Interesting thing I bought recently on Ebay is a external Amiga floppy disk connector plus cable with integrated floppy drive power supply that can be used to connect a Gotek floppy drive emulator to an Amiga!

For those with Classic Amigas with Workbench 2.0 and above, this is excellent as it means you don't have to open your case up to install the Gotek - it simply plugs into the external floppy drive port and choose to boot from this device in the Early startup menu.

I previously showed the Gotek hooked up to my Amiga 600 and Amiga 1000 using the internal floppy drive connector - opening the case and going into some detail on the operation of the Gotek so I won't repeat myself again here - click the Amiga 600 and Amiga 1000 links for more info!

But today, I am using the external connector on the CDTV to use the Gotek! This is because, unique to the CDTV, the external floppy drive IS DF0 and bootable on Workbench 1.3 without modification internally!

Here is the Gotek drive with USB attached, and the external floppy cable with power:

This is my standard CDTV, connected via AV to a TV screen (looks like a computer monitor I know but it is actually a TV with a tuner in it and remote control):

Here is the Gotek all connected up, ready to plug into the floppy connector on the CDTV - I love the simplicity and the fact a separate power source is not needed for the Gotek with this setup. Just plug in and go:

Here is the Gotek now plugged into the CDTV:

First power on and we boot into a Classic Amiga game - Katakis:

It works fantastic - I recommend picking up the external connector if you have a Gotek drive. I assume it will work well with a HxC floppy drive too, but not tested.

Since I had the CDTV on, I couldn't resist loading up the Psygnosis Commodore Demo CD - very cool:

Unless you have a CDTV or emulate one, chances are you missed out on this rather interesting CDTV only CD - there are a few that were only released on CDTV:

I plan to bring the CDTV and Gotek setup as above to the Adelaide Amiga 30 meeting on Monday night, so if you are in Adelaide please come along to the meeting and you can see it in the flesh and try it out yourself!